Photo credit: Nuhan Zainal

How I Created A Lego Mural for Google

Using pixel art, illustration and Excel sheet

Sarah Tan
Muzli - Design Inspiration
6 min readApr 14, 2020

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In 2018, I had the amazing opportunity to work at Google Sydney as a designer. During my time there, I got to create a Lego mural for the Google Melbourne office for their launch event.

After trying out resources online and experimenting with different methods, I decided to write an article about the methods I adopted to create the mural from scratch.

1. Drawing the design

To start off, I had to come up with a few designs to pitch to the stakeholders involved. The brief was to make a mural of something that is special to Melbourne, so I made pixel artworks of the iconic Melbourne trams, Brighton beach houses and a graphic depicting Melbourne’s coffee culture.

Initial concepts I designed

I made the pixel art in Adobe Illustrator in the same dimensions of the wall I will be working on.

In the end, we decided to go with highlighting Melbourne’s coffee culture,

2. How many Lego pieces do I need?

Final Artwork

Now that the artwork is chosen and simplified, I had to calculate how many Lego pieces I needed to order to build the mural. Initially, the options and tools I wanted to use were:

  • PhotoBrick
  • PicToBrick
  • Brickaizer

In the end, I realised that although those platforms are amazing, they jus couldn’t cater to my size of the wall. So I decided to use the good old Microsoft Excel!

In Excel, these are the steps I took to plan my design:

Step 1: Set the amount of “boxes” according to your wall and make all of it square

The wall I worked with was big. I remember it had more than 5000 lego studs for the base. So I divided them and represented each “box” as a 2x2 lego base.

Step 2: Start with one colour first

Fill a “box” with your first colour and put an alphabet to it. I typed out the letter in the column and changed the text colour to be the same as the fill colour. For example (as shown in the image below), I would start out by placing the letters in each box like in column A. Next, I would change the text colours to their respective colour as shown in column B. Finally, I would change the fill to be the same colour as the text colour, as shown in column C. This way, you can make your artwork in Excel and still have a way to track the number of Lego brick colours.

Note: Don’t use the same letters for two colours. As you can see I have a Brown in 1 and a Blue in 6. I changed the Blue to “Bl” instead of “B” so I could track them separately.

My colour codes

In this case, you can see if there is a letter assigned to each colour.

“Y” for yellow

Step 3: Copy and paste the “box” to form your design

Since you’ve assigned your letter to each of the colours, the next step is to copy and paste your letters (column C) in order to form your design. By doing it this way, you can accurately track the number of Lego bricks you will be using without missing anything. This can take a while and remember to refer to your original artwork while doing it.

Step 4: Create another sheet in the tab section to display your calculation

To create a new sheet, click on the plus icon at the bottom of your Excel sheet.

Now, we have to calculate the number of colours to be used for your artwork. Here is the formula to calculate individual colours used by identifying the number of colour codes you have placed in your previous sheet. For example, the formula below helps display the number of “Y”(yellow) in my design

=COUNTIF(‘Coffee idea’!1:1048576,”Y”)

Formula: =COUNTIF(‘<name of your artwork sheet>’!,<from this column>:<to this column>,”<the letter you assign to the colour>”)

Repeat the same formula for other colours (Change the “Y” to the other colour codes) and lay them out clearly. Ignore my “max” column, it was there to remind me the number of lego pieces available at the store I was getting it from.

My final calculations

3. Execution!

This is where the most labour intensive part comes in, making the mural itself.

Firstly, I sorted the Lego pieces by colour and shapes.

Throughout the counting process, I am carrying my laptop with me and looking at my Excel sheet, making sure I am getting my count correct.

I started with the white colour as it is the border for most elements in the design, then I used the brown the fill it in. I took me around 10 hours to finish the mural, the Excel sheet helped me a lot in knowing how many pieces I needed to prepare and where to put them. Remember to have one of this Lego separator tool too to make your life easier if you made a mistake.

My lifesaver

Here are some photos of the end product

I added some fun creations my colleagues made like the dinosaurs
Photo credit: Nuhan Zainal
Photo credit: Nuhan Zainal

As a brand engagement activity, we put lego pieces into milk jugs and encouraged the public to make their coffee art on the mural too!

Learnings

This experience taught me how to embrace uncertainty and solve problems without giving up. I was panicking when I couldn’t find a tool to help me in this project or people who have done this before online, but that led me to think outside the box and come up with my own methods. I also got this opportunity by reaching out and raising my hand so don’t be afraid to initiate and put yourself out there.

Thank you for reading and I hope that this helps you with your projects!

Hi, I’m Sarah Tan and I am a Visual Designer based in Sydney, I mainly do product design, graphic design, illustration and AR experiments. Check out more about my work or connect with me on LinkedIn and Instagram. If you would like to support me, buy me a coffee!

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